I'm in a true bind over the following. I have a computer at the office, which I decided to upgrade with more RAM. As a result I think I fried the mainboard in it as it doesn't start anymore, even with the old RAM. The hard drive in it is intact and it contains lots of software several thousand $$ worth. It has Windows 2000 Pro installed and is broken on 2 partitions. Now I have another PC with a totally different hardware.

My first question is, what if I take the hard disk from a fried PC and put it into a new one? Will it work or will it crash without any chance of recovery. Again I'm not that worried about hardware as software.

Second question is, how to copy the entire hard drive to a new one?

Your help will be greatly appreciated!!! I don't have much time to fix that. I might easily get fired over it if I don't fix it. ANY IDEAS PLEASE!

get the the harddrive you want and get it in the one . the biggest thing is to open the case and install it and just let window automatically recognize it. harddrives that are formated by old OS and be read by XP's. once you got the things you like in the old one you can reformate the old one and get some space.

The simplest solution is to replace the motherboard in the old computer with an identical one.

this is correct

are you trying to fix the PC B4 someone finds out.
You have something in your OS called the HAL. Each one is different depending on your hardware. If you try and boot the hd in a different pc, at the minimal you will need new drivers...or you could bork the whole OS. Is there any special hardware the the software needed in the old pc. ? You may end up borking the software. if you just boot it in the new pc. Possible doing an inplace install might work.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ get that and burn the image to a disc, put your hard drive into the new computer and boot from the disc, you should be able to sue one of the tools to clone your hard drive onto the new one,, this will erase all data and partitions on the new had, but you should get all your data back,, i did it with a f**ked hard drive that windows wouldnt recognise and got 50 gigs of data back,

Thank you guys for all your help. I didn't reply right away as I was busy with my problem. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to resurect the motherboard, it looks like I indeed fried it somehow. (I know it as I made a test. I broght it into one of a local computer shops and asked the guy to pick memory for it. He told me that it's toast and does not respond.)

What I did, I had to copy all the partitions from original HDD into one of my hard drives (loosing all the data on my HDD, but that's OK), then placing it into one of my older computers and booting from it. I have to keep it this way (under the table, literally, until I buy a new board for them -- another headache) As someone predicted it did not boot this way. It simply hang where it says loading Windows forever.

After a few attempts to boot up in Simple Mode (or how they call it), I attempted to repair Windows. My problem was locating Windows 2000 Pro, as it's not that I had it either. Luckily one of the guys bailed me out and gave me his with a promise that I won't use his registration code for it. It took me another 3 hours of breaking sweat over repairing Windows. Now with some minor losses the software is restored.

Again my headache now is to locate the same exact motherboard or a similar one to put into old box and use original HDD, as obviously I'm not going to give them my computer for good.

Does anyone know where is the best place to buy a mother board and how to pick a similar one?